


songs sound just as different as the mountains we sing them from

by Not_A_Valid_Opinion



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Borderline Personality Disorder, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Issues with Eating, M/M, Skipping Meals, Time Skips, focus on music, half a vent fic half a Wow He Literally Canon Has This fic, healing through music, if people take canon lightly i get it but i dont want to ignore that either, introspection into love, mentions of the Geiszler family, newton character study, newton has bpd, then again canon hermann has a girlfriend so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:28:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27070501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_A_Valid_Opinion/pseuds/Not_A_Valid_Opinion
Summary: Hermann’s rhythmic sounds, a soothing contrast to the low-volumed heavy metal still laxly playing from the radio, travel over that line- perhaps the only part of him that’s made its way onto Newt’s side of the room.(In which Newton has a low moment, and Hermann is there for him, in his own way).
Relationships: Newton Geiszler & Hermann Gottlieb, Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 2
Kudos: 31





	songs sound just as different as the mountains we sing them from

It never fucking mattered to him. 

(Ya, right). 

God, he wished it didn't matter to him. He wished that the fact that nobody stayed, that nobody could stand to be around him, that nobody thought he was worth it; he wished he didn't care. 

Newt cared. A lot. 

He got good at not showing it, though. 

His parents, they had problems. They were kind, and they loved him, but that didn't last and in the end he was raised by his father and his uncle. His mother leaving was the first of many, and at a young age, Newton had little skill in pretending- he was a fast learner. He put an effort into learning to cope with what his uncle showed him about electronics, with what he turned into something new, showed off as something better. He impressed his family to replace the family that left; despite this, Newton loved it. He loves the rush of creating and inventing from what was already known, what was already there. He learned early that he was smart, smarter than most anybody in the room. 

And he focused on that. 

He excelled; his creativity drove him to skip grades and skyrocket up in the world, and he found his interest in biology and the general scientific field driving that incentive to do better, to do more. Newt is young and he is smart and he is moving fast, faster than he can think, jumping before he can measure the distance. 

(It was only a matter of time before he fell.)

Newt loves music. He wants to be a rock star when he grows up, one that understands the world in a way no other rock star does. He’s going to be smart. 

_  
  
_

School is stupid. His grades are shit, but he knows what he's talking about. He gets into fights often, and he can't hold a friend to save his life. 

Fuck them. He doesn't need them. He’ll be a star and he’ll shine so bright he’ll blind them all, wont he? He’ll show them. So who cares if they call him “mental” or a “nut-case” or a million other thing that he thinks about in agony each night. So what if they hate him for being the way he is, and Newt can't even hold it against them because he gets it, he can feel himself saying the wrong things and acting the wrong way and being totally inept at stopping himself. Newt will show them, even if he cares. He can't both win  _ and _ win them over- the way he sees it, he has to pick one. Pick, where everyone else seems naturally born into the ability to do both, to juggle sociability with specialty. Everyone else seems to be able to talk with others without scaring them away, always scaring them away and leaving him with nothing more than what he likes and what he’s good at, two conflicting points in themselves, a war winning out to follow science over music because there’s music in everything and it’s his job to find it in every carcass he examines and every blood type he analyzes. Newt is not one who can stop running until the ground catches him and holds him and he lays there and- 

_  
  
_

He’s too busy for love. To love people in general, or the act of loving itself. He thinks, one day, maybe, when he’s done enough. When he’s redefined the nature of the world, released at least seven rock albums and become as acclaimed as Queen, when he’s looked some sort of god in the eye and made that god flinch; then sure, he’d be happy to take a hand and hold it tight and close his eyes. 

It's easy, to close his eyes. Its so fucking easy to let them close, to make them. It would be so easy to make them. 

Newton thinks about things like that a lot. 

It’s kind of like drowning. Drowning, but he’s still in his bed, and the blankets are crowding his throat, and it's all he can do but remain. Days like that, he can't get out of bed. He cant go to school- who fucking needs it anyway, he can put together anything he’ll miss in no time- not on days like these. Newt grows used to it as he gets older, even if he's not sure what it is until he's old enough for the word to make sense. There are those days where he can't get out of bed, and where all that's in his head is a clouded feeling of rage, of a tired rage at nothing, at himself, at it all. Those days, it's hard to not hurt. It’s hard to feel at all, if hurt even makes its way through. It’s hard to not dig his fingernails into his skin tight and bloody, to hold his breath as long as he can, to ruin what's left of him, what little is left of him on those days. 

His uncle wraps his hands, his wrists, his injuries. And Newt watches him uneasily, ready to throw up, holding it back, choking it down, choking. His uncle wraps him up, and Newt watches his hands work, noticing the tattoo on the back of his hand like he'd never seen it before. 

“What’s that,” he asks, young and not young enough. His uncle looks at the back of his hand, staring at the markings, black curves meeting, dotted in the centre. 

“Eye of God,” is the answer, spoken with some sort of pride. “Got it when I was a little older than you, Newt.” 

Newt can't look away. “Did it hurt? T-to get?” 

“Sure. But ain't it worth it?” he asks, looking over the tattoo, smiling at it as though it were his own son. 

Newt stares at the bandages on his palms. “Ya,” he agrees, in a way. 

He snaps out of it rather violently. For an indeterminate amount of time, he’d been staring into the same Kaiju fissure, mind suddenly completely blank and remaining so, a white fuzz in the background of his mind. It was like pure static, and he’s not sure what snapped him out of it, but he jerks back without his own mind giving warning to his body’s action; he drops his scalp, surprised he’d even still been holding it, had managed to keep a grip on it at all. It falls to the floor with a clink, not incredibly loud but echoing somewhat brutally in Newt’s ears. 

For a moment, he simply stares at it before he can find the energy within him to shake his head, forcing the static out of his ears enough that he can reach down for the lost material. He places it back on the counter slowly, then turns back to the fissure he’d been dissecting, attempting to refocus. 

“Perhaps we should stop for a meal break.”    
Newt glances up. Hermann is still looking at his chalkboard, giving no indication that he’d spoken at all. The xenobiologist narrows his eyes, waiting for something, but Hermann adamantly looks over his work, adding more numbers here and there. 

He frowns. “Not really hungry,” he says, assuming Hermann had spoken anyway. The mathematician glances over to him, looking bored. 

“You’ve been staring at the same section of your foul artifact for the last eight minutes,” he proclaims, a tone of boredom there. “I believe a meal break is in order.” 

Eight minutes? Newt looks at the clock, blinking dumbly at it. “Huh,” he says, somewhat dully. In reality, he felt exhausted. Not like he could go to sleep, not really, but suddenly his work was far beyond the capacity of what he could achieve today. And it was  _ easy,  _ he was merely reviewing the feasibility of his hypothesis that he needed in order to hop into a larger project. It was a half-hour project, at most, and yet it felt like it could take ages. 

He sighs. It wasn't a sugar low, not like Hermann was clearly assuming. Newt knew himself well enough to recognize his own lows; his dissociative tendencies usually kicked in at random, but there was always a pattern to them. Still, it was true he hadn’t eaten in a while- he’d at least skipped lunch, working none-stop before and through when he usually left, and it was certainly around the time of night Hermann usually left for dinner himself. 

Of course, he usually left on his own. Newt didn’t tend to sit with him while they ate, what with Newt preferring an earlier meal time by one line of reasoning, another being simply that Hermann was a brat about wanting to eat alone. Sometimes Newt would follow him to the cafeteria despite his arguing, but today he simply didn’t have the energy, although- 

“Wait. Are you  _ inviting  _ me to eat with you?” his voice squeaks around the question, a natural octave for him, and Hermann huffs at the sound. The man puts down his chalk, hobbling over to his sink area to wash his hands. A harmonica that Newt had snuck onto his side of the room was resting against the sink, and Newt can't help but stare at it, trying to recall when he’d hid it there and why it was  _ still  _ there. 

“I suppose I am,” he says over the stream of the water, before Newton can wonder any more about the instrument. “Just this once, Dr. Geiszler. Just this once.” 

Newt blinks slowly. It’s not even that late out, but he feels positively drained. Usually he’d hop over this chance, bouncing at the opportunity and blabbering until Hermann wanted nothing more than to take it back. As he felt, though, the thought of sitting at the cafeteria- of all the eyes watching him and of being unable to keep up any usual banter that such a setting might require- was enough for him to pitifully hang his head. 

He scratches the side of his face in an effort to hide his dejected expression. “Rain check?” 

He can feel Hermann staring at him, though it doesn’t last very long. “Very well,” the man says, before turning away and exiting the lab solo. 

Once the door closes, Newton practically collapses into the chair behind him. His hands drag over his face. 

The xenobiologist tries not to think about it. He tries to hop back into his work, to finish up and write it all out and prep for the morning, maybe even get a head start on his early assignment like he’d usually do, but the silence of the lab is almost worse than the sounds of the cafeteria chattering, all about him, and not in the way he’d used to dream of. His music plays faintly in the background, perhaps loud yet hardly reaching him. 

Fame and fortune, oh, he’d achieved- but the word “reputation” could be followed up with a number of others, none the likes he’d have hoped for, despite the overall good- meaningful- position he’d landed himself at the Shatterdome. 

With Hermann too, no less. Why had he asked him to join him for food? The man never wanted to be seen in public with him. Newt was too much- he was always too much, even for Hermann. 

He pushes his wheely chair across the lab and over to his radio, grabbing for the radio, hesitating at the sight of his hands shaking. He huffs and fiddles with the dial, turning up the heavy metal as loud as it could possibly go. 

Newt could work with music at any volume, but he couldn’t think with it this loud, which was why it was perfect. He needed the distraction. He could feel his arms itching, and the temptation to scratch into them has become both more intense and more distressing to consider ever since he got his sleeves. The tattoos whirl on his skin like testaments to the enormity of the universe, of the most that is out there and the little that is understood about it, as the product of a mind wired to make it to the top just to see the view without any consideration into how to get back down. 

Newt finds himself staring at them instead of the Kaiju. Or, not really- he’s staring at the Kaiju on his arms, after all. But one is a statement, a reminder, a testament- and the other is a job, an opportunity to do good, a thing of dread to look at. Music seemed to matter so little when the world was being torn apart by monsters so many songs these days called gods. The Kaiju in front of him, on his body, just one of many- it killed hundreds of people before it got taken down. His eyes flit between the ones on his arms, carrying similar counts but merely representations of the real thing, and the damning evidence of life created to cause death on his table. A thing looks so different on skin than a cold, metal examination paper. There’s so much to their little world in that alone. 

He wants to cry, for some reason, and has little self control not to. Instead, he picks up a scalpel and tugs himself back into his work. When Hermann comes back from his meal, he stands at the doorway, leaning on his cane and glaring. 

“Must your tunes be so destructively loud?” is the shout he gets, necessary to speak over the heavy metal. Newt rolls his eyes, wheeling back over to the radio and turning it down. He gestures to the thing with a placating gesture, and Hermann sighs. “You’ll blow your eardrums out the way you had it; if not yours, then the ears of our neighbors, that’s for certain.” 

He shrugs, wheeling back to the table. “It helps me focus.” 

Hermann scoffs, silently making his way to his side of the room save for the noisy tap of his cane with each step. Only, he doesn’t go to his side- he crosses into Newt’s. The xenobiologist stares in surprise as Hermann places a take-out container on his work desk, the only space on his side of the room both off the floor and free of Kaiju parts. When he turns around to see Newt staring with a raised eyebrow, the man looks away. “I couldn’t finish all of my meal. It tasted… much blander, than usual. I figured you have no standards, so perhaps you would ensure it not go to waste?” 

Newt blinks. After a moment, he closes his jaw, not realizing he’d dropped it to begin with. Gingerly, he pushes his chair over to the orderly desk, lifting up the takeout container and opening the lid to look inside. 

A few wontons. Some rice, tucked neatly to the side. A bunch of green shit Newt would never have grabbed himself, even some croutons in there, alongside three thin strips of pork. His eyebrows furrow, for a moment, because these were  _ not  _ leftovers. 

Then, he smiles. His eyes make their way to Hermann’s. “Sure, man,” he agrees, making it sound like he’d agreed to do Hermann a favor- and perhaps he had, for the man nods in satisfaction once before crossing over the lab and diving headfirst into his own work. 

He picks up his chalk and hops into his work. Newton idly chews the food, not entirely big on his appetite but hungrier than he thought he’d been. Hermann had given him a fork inside the container, and he’d thought about purposefully not using it to eat the food easier and possibly rile Hermann up, but the thought of his Kaiju-entrialed hands touching the food he’d been eating and the extra effort he didn’t feel like taking just to wash his hands didn’t very much appeal. So, with a fork, he gingerly eats, listening more than watching as Hermann writes some numbers out on the chalkboard. The man hums to himself, every once in a while, and his feet drag when he makes a hobble to his computer to type away at notes before returning back to the chalkboard. The sounds are small, especially from the distance the two have, separated by a line right now the middle, the result of a petulant argument that none have yet found the heart to make it up to each other for, thus the line remains. 

Hermann’s rhythmic sounds, a soothing contrast to the low-volumed heavy metal still laxly playing from the radio, travel over that line- perhaps the only part of him that’s made its way onto Newt’s side of the room. Unlike the mathematician's side, in which Newt’s harmonica remains, laid beside the sink at an odd, hidden angle that was both very noticeable and very silent. And for all Newt can do to wonder why Hermann had yet to chuck it at Newt’s head and yell at him once again for not respecting the boundaries of the line- he thinks, he already knows the answer. 

The food feels warm in his stomach, and music will always be a part of Newt’s life. 

**Author's Note:**

> they're fucking gay harold.. . 
> 
> I'm @ dasicality on instagram and tumblr if anybody wants to say hi :) or ask me what the fuck


End file.
